According
to Yesh Atid sources quoted in a Maariv report, the party demands that the
government enable public transportation to operate far more widely on weekends,
albeit at a lesser scale than during the week.

Further
demands are that the state establish civil marriage for those forbidden or
unwilling to wed under Jewish law, the easing of conversion requirements and
changes in the country’s Chief Rabbinate.

Rabbi Seth
Farber, director of ITIM, an organization that promotes improved relations
between religious and secular Jews in Israel, said Tuesday that he has met with
many Knesset members and came away “cautiously optimistic.

“There is
a lot of opportunity to move items on my group’s agenda forward,” he said.
Shas, a haredi party, currently controls Israel’s Interior Ministry, which
oversees immigration policy and rules on the contentious “Who is a Jew” issue.

As first
step, we need to know that Yesh Atid is demanding that freedom of marriage is
realized, bringing Israel in line with all other world democracies, and
responding to the yearning of the clear majority of Israelis and all of Yesh
Atid supporters!

While a
new Israeli government is being put together, I would urge those who see the
current power in the hands of the ultra-Orthodox as untenable to make their
voices heard, and to make their position known.

These
issues hit me viscerally, because while I have devoted my life to Judaism, I
studied for conversion with a Reform rabbi, and was examined and taken to the
mikveh by a Reform beit din. That is how I became a Jew.

A
religious school cannot fire an unmarried female teacher who becomes pregnant
through in-vitro fertilization, even though the law allows such schools to take
religious values into account when making personnel decisions, the Tel Aviv
Labor Court ruled Monday.

The court
ruled that “the right to be a parent, the freedom to work, and human dignity
and liberty” supersede the right of a religious school to refuse to expose its
students to alternative family models.

The desire
of the school's leadership to protect its students from what it deems a
teacher's improper behavior was outweighed by more fundamental rights deriving
from the Basic Law on Freedom of Occupation and the Basic Law on Human Dignity
and Liberty.

It must be hoped that other communities that enjoy broad autonomy
in determining their lifestyle will take the court's message to heart.

The perpetrators are
no more than a band of amateur terrorists whose arsenal consists of rocks,
sticks, and smelly fish oil — dangerous to private citizens but hardly a threat
that any competent police force cannot handle. Thus, a clear message from the
municipality to target this bullying is key in solving the problem. It's not
rocket science. ...

The Beit Shemesh
municipality has failed in its job of upholding the law. Now it's our turn, as
private citizens, to do our job by challenging our elected leaders in court and
publicly exposing their ineptitude. By taking the Beit Shemesh municipality to
court and engaging the press, we hope to begin the process of restoring
civility to our streets.

Four
religious Jewish women from the city of Beit Shemesh have filedsuit against the
city for failing to prevent an extremist sect’s pressure on women to dress
according to its own strict rules of modesty.

MKs Aliza
Lavie (Yesh Atid) and Shuli Muallem (Bayit Yehudi) proposed legislation
requiring at least four women to be on the panel that selects religious judges,
or dayanim, which currently has no female members.

Transportation
Ministry director-general Uzi Yitzhaki ordered an investigation of the
incident. In addition, he said the ministry would increase supervision by
female inspectors and reestablish a hotline for complaints about women being
sent to the back of buses.

It was
just announced that Yesh Atid decided to support Rabbi David Stav, chairman of
Tzohar rabbis, as the candidate for chief Ashkenazi rabbi and demanded his
appointment as part of your coalition negotiations. This raises a major
question: Is Yesh Atid just as determined to demand freedom of marriage in
Israel as it is to support Rabbi Stav?

Parliamentary
support will not suffice for Stav. The majority of the selection committee — 90
members — are rabbis currently serving in official rabbinate posts around the
country, most of them ultra-Orthodox.

Less
than 30 of the committee members are subject, directly or indirectly, to
government appointment. Most of the rest are mayors, some of them with ties to
the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party Shas, and thus unlikely to back Stav.

The
ultra-Orthodox are confident that the final results will favor a candidate
acceptable to them, said Yossi Elituv, editor of the influential ultra-Orthodox
weekly Mishpacha — meaning someone other than Stav.

The
rabbinate should be privatized. Those who wish to observe halakha can choose
their rabbis and go on their way. That is what the Haredim do. The state
doesn’t need to engage in religious guidance, certainly not in enforcing it by
law.

Israel will continue to exist and prosper even if all couples marry at
City Hall or with the justice of the peace, and when the majority chooses this
way, halakha will change too. But this doesn’t interest Rabbi Stav.

Last
Thursday, a group of around 30 leading conservative national religious rabbis
convened a meeting in Jerusalem to discuss the issue of candidacy. A vote was
taken in which Rabbi Eliezer Igra, a rabbinical judge on the Supreme Rabbinical
Court, was selected as the preferred candidate.

Now,
with Shas headed to opposition, the deal makers are concerned for the
significant change in the political map may upset his and other deals in the
works. This will significantly diminish the chances of the dati leumi
candidate.

The Chief
Rabbinical Council will hold on Monday the last meeting of its current term to
make a series of decisions about kashrut supervision, the ordination of rabbis
and rabbinical court judges, burials and more.

[After the case], people
became ecstatic and started saying, ‘Now we are going to tackle neighborhood
rabbis, and we want weddings and conversions.’ It is good to dream, but this
will be a very slow, slow process. … And with the new elections [that happened
in January] we have no idea who will be next minister of culture and sport, and
that could make a difference.

Encouraging Israeli PM
Netanyahu to respond to American Jewish anger over Israel's discrimination of
non-Orthodox Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, immediate past president of the Union
for Reform Judaism, explains why he sent the PM a letter.

I'm not sure we will manage
to immediately solve all these issues, but we do wish to propose changes to the
current status quo in which the default definitions and criteria for Jewish
identity are always the orthodox-Haredi ones. We want more equality when it
comes to the holy places, Kashrut, conversion and Marriages.

Calderon, for her part,
hopes her approach can bridge over these gaps. She said Yesh Atid is drafting a
new status quo for secular-religious relations, including yeshiva study, army
service, and the rules of holy places.

“I respect [Women of the Wall] greatly,
and I feel pain when they are hurt, but it’s not my way,” she said. “I want to
try to build a coalition with the different communities of Jews that will enable
us to live our lives the way we want to, but then to also feel respected, and
to live together.”

With the emergence of
people like Ruth Calderon however, and with the emergence of self-described
“secular” institutions of classical Jewish learning such as Alma, and Elul, and
Bina, we are seeing a development that just might step into the breach.

A new
way of thinking and learning and behaving as a Jew in the modern world
which can actually serve as a vital partner and ally of traditional
Orthodoxy, living in dynamic intellectual and spiritual interchange with it,
and with it weaving a net of Jewish life that will capture so many who might
otherwise fall through the cracks.

Ruth
Calderon’s maiden speech in the Knesset, which won plaudits from every
direction, melted hearts and has already chalked up 190,000 views on YouTube.
The emotional paean of praise, delivered in a trembling voice, amounts to the
same-old capitulation.

Secular politicians, with their ideological cart
empty, fall back on self-deprecation and feelings of inferiority.

This is an
opportunity to replace the idea of “either/or” with “this and that at the same
time” – Jewish, religious and democratic, too. The religious person within me
is the connection to the past and its traditions. The democratic person within
me is the bridge to all the people who are different from me, but with whom I
still have a great deal in common.

Yitzhak
Vaknin is a member of Shas, a party that opposes mandatory conscription of
yeshiva students - a position being championed by the Yesh Atid party - and
that has never in its history had a female party member.

And yet, in this
exchange, two members of Knesset from diametrically opposed worldviews on the
future of Israel and how to get there found a mutual language from our shared
tradition. At that moment, the Knesset became a beit midrash.

So why
does Limmud usually leave me so conflicted? Because I’m invariably headed back
to Israel, where the silos stand tall, where more often than not, we manage not
to meet people who construct meaningful Jewish lives differently than we do,
where policy is made top-down and not bottom-up, where authority is derived
from politics and not from knowledge, creativity and the passion of one’s
convictions.

Amos Oz: Present-day Israel, including
Tel Aviv, where myriads just voted for the secularist and future-oriented party
Yesh Atid, is at the same time enjoying a veritable renaissance of age-old
Jewish culture. Musicians and novelists are delving into the ancient and
medieval texts with great panache. In this sense, Jews and Words is a
very contemporary Israeli book.

There was a great deal
about Rav Froman that was sensational, in every sense of the word. He would
often kiss the earth of Israel; at night, he would say the shema prayer
for hours. He was often prone to joke about all things—religious and otherwise.
But that’s what my friend found so compelling about him. Rav Froman was
important because he broke the rules.

There was
nothing quite like the funeral of Rabbi Menachem Froman, just as there was no
one quite like Rav Menachem, as we called him. For hours the thousands of
mourners who gathered in the synagogue of his settlement, Tekoa, wept as we
sang the songs he loved – songs of devotion and longing for God, songs against
fear, songs of the land of Israel.

He was born
to a secular family in Kfar Hasidim in northern Israel and studied in the
prestigious Hebrew Reali School in Haifa before serving in the military as a
paratrooper and participating in the liberation (or capture) of the Western
Wall. After his army service he found religion. He attended Mercaz HaRav and
Yeshivat Hakotel and was ordained by famous rabbis Shlomo Goren and Avraham
Shapira, both hugely influential in the blossoming religious Zionist movement.

Israel in
2029 was not a religious utopia. It could not escape the hedonism and
secularism so endemic to Western culture. But it was a country in which an end
to Orthodox hegemony had produced a revived Orthodoxy, an active and growing
progressive Judaism, broad pockets of deep religious commitment, serious Jewish
education, and a major challenge to the spiritual emptiness that had so long
characterized Israeli society.It was a country to which Jews of the Diaspora
looked for inspiration and spiritual sustenance. It was a Jewish state which,
by divesting itself of authority over Judaism, had revived Judaism, and, for
many of its grateful citizens, had transformed Torah from a political slogan
into an 'ets hayyim'.

The Smith Research Institute and
Hiddush – Freedom of Religion for Israel conducted a poll which found that 57%
of the Jewish population in Israel (80% of secular Jews) do not object to a
family member marrying a partner who comes from an immigrant family and whose
father is Jewish, but mother is not.

“They want to yank me out
to intimidate us,” she says in accented English to the growing crowd, mostly
women but also a sprinkling of men, who have come to support the group. “But we
are doing the right thing. We are fighting for a voice and a place at the
holiest site.” Later she tells me: “If Israel claims to be the state of the
Jews, with Jerusalem the capital of the Jewish world and the Western Wall the
holiest site of the Jewish people, then Israel has to adopt practices that
reflect the realities of the larger Jewish world.”

The
“religious/secular” divide never really reflected the diversity of Jewish
expression in Israel. Today, it
should be declared dead.

And David
Hartman, years before the idea was popular, led the effort to bury it. Yes, the
inadequate language of “religious and secular” still exists and permeates the
discourse, but it does not reflect reality.

It
obscures more than it reveals about what Jewish Israelis feel about the role of
Judaism in the state and in their lives. It confuses both what is agreed and
what is disputed about the place of Jewish identity in Israeli society.

Jews
around the world, most of whom are not Orthodox, will largely continue to love
Israel, to fear for its future, to work on its behalf, and even to sacrifice
themselves or put themselves at risk for us. They are fulfilling the
obligation, ingrained in Jewish culture, to look out for one's fellow Jew. They
will do so because that's what Jews do. They will do so despite the fact that,
as it has in the past, Israel will continue to treat them selfishly and
cynically.

While
there is much to be gained from aliyah, to suggest that the potential
sacrifices involved will only make one more Jewish is to grossly equate
Israeliness with Jewishness. That equation is just too easy, and allows for
sidestepping of “the question Yehoshua desperately wants us not to ask: what is
the Judaic significance of the Jewish State?” as Rabbi Shai Held of Mechon
Hadar succinctly put it.

In our
community’s search for a way to secure Jewish continuity, there’s one type of
program that has gotten short changed. In January, Repair the World and The
Jewish Agency for Israel released a report about service-learning. Don’t know
what this is? You’re probably not alone. But everyone soon will need to know
because its success in attracting today’s young adults is unparalleled.

Among the
fastest growing post-college programs to Israel today, says Rubel, is the genre
of so-called Jewish service learning trips. This is where participants come to
Israel, dig in their heels in one, usually less-than-glamorous-location, and
try and do some good – while at the same time rooting their experience within
the context of social change and Jewish values.

There is a
role reversal here, is it not from Zion that the Torah will emerge? I believe
and hope that Israel should function as the cultural center of the Jewish
people, yet high political stakes continue to hold us back.

The
Jerusalem-based Jewish Peoplehood Hub recently closed down, just 13 months
after its creation was announced amid great fanfare at the Jewish Federations
of North America's General Assembly in November 2009.

CWJ
announces a new online initiative, "You, Me and the Rabbinic
Court,” that will enable women to
gain knowledge, insight and support from one another. We invite women to share
their personal stories relating to rabbinic challenges: lines of
questioning that have no relevance to the case in hand, cases that dragged on
interminably or that were rejected out of hand, cases where women suffered
contemptuous treatment.